Laura Tripaldi.
Parallel Minds: discovering the intelligence of materials.
Urbanomic. 2022
Can we understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects,
but as other intelligences interacting with our own?
In Parallel Minds Laura Tripaidi offers detailed insights into
the starting properties of materials as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry,
synthetic biology, and nanotechnology,
along with a rich philosophical reflection crossing the frontiers between nature and culture,
where the latest scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth.
The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with ‘strange minds’—from cobwebs to Kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems. In leading us through this labyrinth of intelligent materials, Tripaldi picks up the thread of new materialisms and—in the historical weave between ‘women’s work’ and the ‘unnatural sciences’—contemporary feminisms.